


in secret, between the shadow and the soul

by witchertrashbag (intothegarbagechute)



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Consensual Daemon Touching, Consensual Underage Sex, Daemon Separation, M/M, daemon AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:55:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28309356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intothegarbagechute/pseuds/witchertrashbag
Summary: Set in a world where humans are born with daemons, physical manifestations of a piece of their souls which shapeshift through various animal forms until they come of age, of theHis Dark Materialstrilogy. In this AU, Witchers are severed from their daemons in their final trial.Eskel is the only person who has ever touched Geralt's daemon-- or rather, she touched him. Decades later, when Geralt finds him on a contract and saves his life, the two idiots finally address what that means.
Relationships: Eskel/Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia
Comments: 18
Kudos: 104
Collections: The Witcher Secret Santa 2020





	in secret, between the shadow and the soul

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vvitchering (Witchering)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Witchering/gifts).



> **content warnings:** depictions two thirteen-year-olds consensually kissing and humping each other! This is not described in great detail. Mentions/suggestions of oral sex, anal sex, and lots and lots of smooches-- but it's not really smut.
> 
> Title from XVII by Pablo Nerudo
> 
> _I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,  
>  or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.  
> I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,  
> in secret, between the shadow and the soul._
> 
> _I love you as the plant that never blooms  
>  but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;  
> thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,  
> risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body._
> 
> _I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.  
>  I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;  
> so I love you because I know no other way_
> 
> _than this: where I does not exist, nor you,  
>  so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,  
> so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep._

It was a bad idea, walking through the town square, but there was nothing for it.

As he trod through the mud, Eskel wished, for the hundredth time, that there was a sign to make oneself invisible. He felt his swords slipping but didn’t dare move to adjust them. He felt the eyes of the villagers glance quickly away as they saw his scars, then draw back in horror as they saw, true as the mud squelching beneath his boots, his missing humanity.

He knocked on the Alderman’s door. A servant and his daemon, a blue healer, greeted him, instantly sensing how alone he was without having to look.

The conversation was short, as they always were. A griffin nest on the bluff by the docks, for a fair price. The Alderman’s daemon, a chinchilla, didn’t take its beady eyes off him for a moment. Eskel nodded and left as quickly as he came. It was too late to hunt today, and he’d already set up camp at the edge of the woods.

But as he walked back through the sodden marketplace, he saw a flash of auburn. A cat, the fishmonger’s daemon, watching him curiously, and instantly Eskel was twelve years old again.

—

_He couldn’t breathe. He was asleep, and he couldn’t breathe. For a moment, he thought it was another test, some horror designed to break him, until his eyes flew open._

_It was an auburn cat, curled up asleep on his chest. But not a cat: Geralt’s daemon, Riga, in one of her favorite forms._

_Eskel drew in a shaky breath. He didn’t dare touch her, but here she slept. His eyes ticked to Geralt, beside them both, sleeping face down in Eskel’s pillow, their lanky bodies squished on the thin bed. His hair was just recently white now, his final mutations before the Trial just a week past, and they’d spent every night since like this, tangled up together in Eskel’s bed._

_But Riga had never touched Eskel before._

_He willed himself to relax, but the feeling of her, of them both, pressing against his bare chest… it was almost painful._

_It was certainly painful to remember, how gentle she looked. How trusting. How she yawned and curled her pink little tongue in her sleep._

_How it revealed Nyx, his own daemon, asleep in Riga’s arms. Currently a little brown mouse. How fitting._

—

By the time he reached his camp, Eskel was shaking. Lil Bleater toddled up to him on her lead, and he yelled until she trotted away behind Scorpion.

“Fuck,” he said. The sun was setting. He didn’t want to hunt, but needed to eat something before he slept. He broke off some dried meat until his stomach settled, then chugged some ale, enough that he would wake up before dawn to piss.

He slept and did not dream.

He awoke well before dawn, sighing at the feeling of the small heat beside him, until he remembered it was Lil Bleater. He scritched her head in apology, thought she had already seemed to forgive him.

Within minutes, he was packed and the clearing looked as though no one had been there at all.

_Nest_ , he reminded himself. They had said _nest._

He hadn’t realized it was a whole family.

He’d taken down a young male first— a mistake, as now his parents both swooped in at him while a young female cried her rage.

He ducked behind a boulder, reloaded his crossbow, and finally landed a bolt in the father’s neck. Not enough to kill him, unfortunately, but enough to both weaken him and make him mad. Both parents attacked with renewed, desperate vigor, the mother getting close enough to land a nasty swipe on his thigh.

 _Well, this is it_ , he thought. _Death by griffins_. And even as he sliced through her claw, he allowed himself a moment to think of how— _when_ — the wolves would hear of his demise. Probably a few years.

He lost his footing, but let his momentum carry him away from the rocks into a spin, and slashed again at the mother before realizing she was attacking him alone. And that the sound of the young female had stopped.

Perhaps his bolt in the father had been more effective than he’d thought— but he was usually right about these things.

The wind shifted and he knew he’d been right. His skin _tingled_ , and he cast a strong igni directly at the mother. The fire stunned her enough to get another crossbow bolt directly through her eye.

Of course, she still managed to land right on top of him.

Within seconds, Eskel’s sword sliced through her wing, allowing him to get free, but not before covering him in the beast’s blood.

“Shit,” he said, and spat some out of his mouth, breathing heavily.

Up on the ridge, he turned and saw Geralt. Two griffin heads already in his hands, but not a drop of blood on him. Eskel grinned.

“Wolf,” he called to him. “How do you manage to keep so clean?”

“How do you get so filthy?”

Eskel arched an eyebrow and felt a throb in his gut at that. He pulled out a knife and began divesting the mother of her head.

“Come down here and—“ his knife came free— “I’ll show you.”

“That a promise?” Geralt asked, having scrambled down the bluff to the thin beach along the riverside.

 _Gods, he really did need to stop doing that, looking like that_ , Eskel thought. He looked back and Geralt’s smirk was replaced with concern.

“Your leg—“

“It’s nothing—“

“Let me look.”

“Trying to get me out of my trousers already, wolf?”

“Just let me look.”

Eskel dropped the head. “Fine. I need to wash before I can take these back anyway.”

“Rough town?”

“About like all the rest,” he replied, groaning as he peeled his gambeson off.

“Let me help,” Geralt said, instantly at his side, unbuckling and pulling his belt off. In moments, Eskel was naked— his breath shallow and heartbeat racing and too nervous to do anything but wade into the river and clean the blood from himself.

“I didn’t know you were in Wyzima,” he told Geralt. He hadn’t heard a word from him since they’d left the keep, although he’d heard word _of_ him, many of them, through snippets of bardsong. Tales of the White Wolf and his sorceress.

“I heard you were here,” Geralt said simply. Too simply.

“Everything all right with Yennefer?” Eskel asked, scooping some water over his shoulders and enjoying the coolness of it after the exertion.

“Yeah, fine, now let me look at your leg.”

Eskel breathed deep, which didn’t help, and waded back out, clean but for the blood streaming from his bare thigh. He heard Geralt’s breath hitch slightly.

“It doesn’t feel that bad.”

“Just let me look,” he said, and knelt before Eskel before gently, so lightly, brushing along the wound.

It took all of Eskel’s considerable willpower to breathe normally. He decided to catalogue where the spleen was in every type of ghoul in his head. Anything to keep this utterly humiliating feeling at bay. This flush and whirl of hope from just a small, intimate, _totally innocent_ touch.

This was why he didn’t touch other people, and especially not Geralt. Why he hadn’t, not since just after the final Trial. But suddenly, he was thirteen again.

—

_Geralt looked naked, although he was fully clothed, and Eskel couldn’t breathe again. She was gone. He had known he would never see her settle, never know what she’d choose, but now she was gone._

_Geralt fell to his knees and Eskel joined him on the floor in the nook—_ **_their_ ** _nook, which was destroyed years later by a trebuchet in the sacking— at the back of the keep._

_“Are you in pain?” he asked Geralt, taking his head in his hands to look in his newly-yellow eyes. They had seen others just after surviving the final Trial. They looked sunken, haunted. Just the way Geralt looked now. The way Eskel supposed he himself looked._

_But Geralt just gazed at him like he was the sun._

_“You’re alive,” he said._

_“Yeah,” Eskel said, not knowing what else to say. “But Riga—“_

_Geralt flinched at the name. He brushed his hands over Eskel’s shoulders, already broadening as he grew, right where Nyx usually sat. When he looked back at Eskel, there were tears in his eyes._

_Eskel hugged him fiercely, but he didn’t stop. So he kissed him, on his forehead. He’d never kissed him before. Geralt instantly stopped crying, and Eskel suddenly bristled, wondering if he’d crossed some line, some line he could never un-cross, and the thought of losing Nyx and Riga and Geralt all at once—_

_Geralt kissed him. On the mouth. Insistently, inexpertly. Smashing their lips together, hard. Eskel heard himself groan into him, felt his hips press against Geralt’s seemingly on their own. Geralt’s hands moved down his body, gripping him, pulling him as close as he could—_

_He could feel how hard Geralt was through their trousers. How hard he was, too. His cock twitched and he gasped at the realization. Geralt’s tongue found its way into his mouth, licking and slurping and Eskel was not altogether sure he liked the feeling but he wanted to match him, as he had in every way, and pressed against him, with his tongue and his cock._

_The heat seared through him, the need. Eskel unbuckled their trousers and drew their pricks out of their braies, holding them together, stunned at the sight of them. Geralt thrust into his hand and let out a needy moan. Eskel kissed him, hard, and Geralt held his hand._

_They thrust eagerly together, as though they could join this way; as though they could undo what had been done to them._

—

“Missed your artery,” Geralt said, slamming Eskel back to the present day, where he and Geralt didn’t touch each other like that. He looked and saw Geralt was already bandaging over the gash. “But you should take care until it’s closed.”

“Sure.”

Geralt stood, but didn’t meet Eskel’s eye. “I could travel with you until you’re healed. Just in case.”

Eskel nodded, unable to say anything more.

Geralt went to set up camp nearly half a day’s ride from the village— any village— while Eskel returned to the alderman, tender atop Scorpion and bearing the four griffin heads. He honestly wasn’t surprised that the heads caused less alarm than his lack of daemon. It was the way of things.

It was a fair price for a nest of two but a meager one for four. Still: he had agreed. The Alderman paid him, his face looking like it could slide right off his skull as he counted over the coins.

Eskel winced with pain from the wound as he rose from his chair and he saw the Alderman startle. He kept his hands visible and moved slowly. He knew without looking that all four guards in the room had grabbed their weapons in their hilts, and he didn’t want to kill anybody today.

“It’s just a scratch,” he explained, nodding at his thigh, now covered in his spare trousers. “I wouldn’t ask for extra payment,” he continued, guessing at reasons for the Alderman’s baffled look.

“You can feel it. When you move,” came the reply.

“Y-yes?” Eskel said, unnerved. “But it will heal.”

“I thought your kind couldn’t feel anything, after what you do to yourselves.”

And with that the Alderman left, his guards and their daemons rather pointedly implying that Eskel should as well. Thank Melitele there was a mounting block outside.

The sun was low in the sky when Scorpion finally sauntered within distance of Geralt’s camp, and Eskel scented something in the wind that curdled his innards: fear. Geralt’s.

Suddenly surging with adrenaline, he drew his sword and pressed Scorpion into a gallop, ready to attack at pace—

But he found Geralt, alone, quite unharmed, tending to a fire with Lil Bleater beside him, Roach grazing off. Eskel pulled Scorpion up. Roach raised her head and chewed rather judgementally, then bent back down for another mouthfull of the oats Geralt had set out.

Geralt said nothing.

Eskel’s body definitely ached as he dismounted; he couldn’t hide another wince. Instantly Geralt was at his side, taking Scorpion’s reins.

“Let me brush him out. There’s meat on the fire; you need to eat,” he said, and before Eskel could argue, he led Scorpion away. Eskel had nothing to do but obey; he walked to the fire and then considered the best way to sit without applying more pressure to his wound.

“You can take your trousers off, if you like,” came Geralt’s voice from the edge of camp as he removed Scorpion’s saddlebags. “If—. That is, if you’re comfortable. I don’t want you to be in pain if you’d otherwise… if I weren’t here.”

“Of course I’m comfortable you idiot,” Eskel said with a grin, then turned away to hide his flush as he unbuckled his belt. He could still smell the sourness of Geralt’s fear— something he hadn’t really sensed for a long time, not this sharply. But it was increasingly tangled with something else, the normal warm musky thick _home_ feeling of Geralt.

He dropped his trousers and the scent grew thicker, more enveloping, more comforting. Eskel knelt in his braies by the fire. The rabbits Geralt had caught were perfectly roasted, and he tucked into a leg, letting himself be overwhelmed by the intense sense of… being cared for, he realized suddenly.

Scorpion snorted fondly, and Eskel heard Roach swish her tail with jealousy as Geralt gave the stallion a carrot. Geralt gave her rump a fond smack and joined Eskel by the fire.

Here, in the flickering light, everything was more intense. Geralt’s hair, his eyes glinting— Eskel now realized he’d taken off his armor and wore only light trousers and a loose, dark shirt. Eskel shivered, though there was no breeze.

Geralt wordlessly took the other rabbit and began to eat, keeping his eyes in the dirt. That little hint of fear laced through the air again, and Eskel suddenly found he could not stand it. He knew, somehow, with absolute certainty, that he was the cause.

He stood instantly. So did Geralt.

“I’ll go,” he told Geralt.

“Why?” said Geralt, floundering.

“You’re afraid, and you’re afraid every time I come near you, Geralt. I don’t know why, but I can’t—“ his voice broke, as much as he tried to barrel through, keep going, keep moving, keep fighting, he couldn’t.

“I can’t hurt you,” he said simply.

He tried to turn. In his mind, he lifted his feet, one right after the other, forgetting about his trousers as he walked directly into the woods. The trouble, of course, was that his body didn’t actually move at all. In fact he found himself even more rooted to the spot as Geralt slowly approached him, like a trainer approaching a new foal.

He found he could hardly breathe as Geralt reached out and traced a finger along his jaw, below his scar. As he closed the distance between them and took his lips in a tender kiss.

A much better kiss than their last. Practiced. Experienced. Lots of experiences. Lots of other lips. And, increasingly, full of longing, need. Desire.

Eskel realized what he’d been smelling on Geralt. Tonight, and many nights. Many nights they’d sat late into the evening by the fire in the keep, reading in silence. And days— sparring sessions, decocting potions, trading tips about safe towns and stories of the humans they met. The scent was always on him, and now, Eskel knew…

“That’s what I’ve been too scared to tell you,” Geralt breathed. “I didn’t even realize it myself, not until…”

He pressed their foreheads together, and Eskel breathed in deep. “Until what?” He asked, brushing his thumb along Geralt’s jaw, staring at his lips. Such perplexing lips. The thought that he could’ve been doing this for years. With _Geralt_ , for years.

Geralt chuckled and turned away slightly, clearly embarrassed.

“I, uh… well Yen’s actually the one who told me to come find you, after I…”

“What?”

“…may have said a name that wasn’t hers while we were…”

Eskel’s eyes went wide. “ _Oh._ While you were…” he stammered.

“Yeah…”

“Ploughing her…”

“Oh, no. I mean, we have, of course, but…”

“But…?” Eskel cocked his head.

“She was uh… she was ploughing me. Rather magnificently, actually. She’s…”

“She has a…?”

“Oh, no. I mean, yes. But it’s made of wood.”

“And you…”

“Yeah.”

“And you said…?”

“ _Yeah_ ,” Geralt said, and he looked so hopeless, so open, gazing right into Eskel’s eyes like he’d wandered in and gotten _terribly_ lost… but also like he had no intention of leaving. In fact, he grabbed Eskel’s arm, stroked it absently with his fingers. “Your name. To be clear. So… I had to come find you. To see if maybe… if you’d…”

“ _Plough you?_ ”

Geralt choked. “No— I mean, _fuck_. But more than that.”

“Yes,” Eskel said simply.

“Yes?” The word was soft and light on Geralt’s tongue, like he was afraid it would float away.

Eskel had done his fair share of ploughing. Incubi, succubi, a higher vampire here and there… mostly monsters, actually, if he were to make a list. Not too many humans were willing to be intimate with someone who’d been severed like him. Those who were had designs about the whole thing and usually wanted either to be ravished by an inhuman beast, or ravish an inhuman beast. Neither of which he particularly enjoyed, not with a stranger.

Touching Geralt, _undressing_ Geralt… It was like every experience he’d had evaporated from his mind. He was posessed by a sense of awe; a little discovery, sure— scars he hadn’t seen before, muscles he hadn’t witnessed so very developed. The feel of his cock in his hand, both much larger than they’d been so long ago.

But also familiarity. The sure strokes and flick of the wrist that sent him to pieces. The taste of him— _fuck_. Of his mouth, of his seed. The scent of him made Eskel feel like an inhuman beast, desperate for more, desperate to drown in this, and he didn’t care.

And Geralt looked so… intoxicated. Like this was all a dream, like he couldn’t believe it. Even on his back, as Eskel finally thrust home inside him, he looked overwhelmed.

They didn’t speak— not in words. And yet thousands passed between them, with every gaze, every gesture, every little soft needy little moan and reedy whine. The breathy hitch in Geralt’s throat as Eskel’s cock dragged across his prostate. The delicious little begging noises he made lit Eskel on fire. He felt so strong, so capable. So loved.

They slept on Eskel’s bedroll by the fire, curled into one another. The horses having long fucked off to the privacy of a copse of trees, Lil Bleater bedding down with them. The roll was narrow— with two broad bodies it felt almost as narrow as his old bed in the dormitories. Or maybe that was just _which_ two bodies were on it.

As Eskel lay on his side, gazing into his lover’s yellow eyes, the two of them sleepy but unwilling to sleep, he almost saw a flash of auburn. Could almost feel the warm pressure of Riga between them, purring in her cat form, curled around Nyx.

If he closed his eyes, he could.


End file.
